Surface quality and surface waves on subwavelength-structured silver films
Abstract
We analyze the physical-chemical surface properties of single-slit, single-groove subwavelength-structured silver films with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and calculate exact solutions to Maxwell's equations corresponding to recent far-field interferometry experiments using these structures. Contrary to a recent suggestion the surface analysis shows that the silver films are free of detectable contaminants. The finite-difference time-domain calculations, in excellent agreement with experiment, show a rapid fringe amplitude decrease in the near zone (slit-groove distance out to 3–4 wavelengths). Extrapolation to slit-groove distances beyond the near zone shows that the surface wave evolves to the expected bound surface plasmon polariton (SPP). Fourier analysis of these results indicates the presence of a distribution of transient, evanescent modes around the SPP that dephase and dissipate as the surface wave evolves from the near to the far zone.
Additional Information
©2007 The American Physical Society. (Received 25 August 2006; published 24 January 2007) Support from the Ministère délégué à l'Enseignement supérieur et à la Recherche under the programme ACI "Nanosciences-Nanotechnologies," the Région Midi-Pyrénées (Grant No. SFC/CR 02/22), and FASTNet (Grant No. HPRN-CT-2002-00304) EU Research Training Network, is gratefully acknowledged, as is support from the Caltech Kavli Nanoscience Institute, the AFOSR under Plasmon MURI Grant No. FA9550-04-1-0434, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center under Grant No. PHY050001. Discussions with P. Lalanne, M. Mansuripur, and H. Atwater and computational assistance from Y. Xie are also gratefully acknowledged.Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 7312
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:GAYpre07
- Created
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2007-01-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute